John Rogers, Wearable Technology Improving Patient Care and Democratizing Healthcare Data
Premature babies often sit within a web of cumbersome wires with adhesive tapes regularly applied and disconnected from their fragile, underdeveloped skin. The highly invasive process restricts the child’s natural motions, complicates the most basic aspects of clinical care and limits parent-child engagement.
John Rogers, a pioneer in the field of bio-integrated electronics, and his Northwestern University research team envisioned a different reality.
Beginning in 2017, Rogers’ lab group began validation studies of its bio-compatible, wireless sensors on premature babies at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago in a broader collaborative effort that included neonatologists, dermatologists and nurses. The team found that its elastic silicone sensors, which are embedded with tiny electronic components, could measure babies’ heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature and other key vitals as accurately as traditional monitoring systems. The soft, flexible sensors were also gentle to the skin, reduced the risk of scarring and enabled more skin-to-skin contact with parents.
“Our partners as well as the parents involved in these studies immediately appreciated the value and the urgency in replacing technologies that represent the current standard of care with something much better,” said Rogers, the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
After Rogers’ group published its findings in Science in March 2019, major media outlets such as NBC’s “Today” show, CBS News and National Geographic spotlighted the innovation. Soon after, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Save the Children organization contacted Rogers about deploying the wearable devices in low and middle-income countries lacking monitoring technology.
The widespread interest in the novel technology spurred the launch of Sibel Health. Led by Dr. Steve Xu, a dermatologist at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and populated with several former members of the Rogers’ research group, Sibel Health is now working to commercialize these breakthrough medical devices.
Since its founding in 2019, Sibel Health has grown to a team of more than 30 engineers and medical doctors, funded entirely using non-dilutive mechanisms. Marrying innovative thought in biomedical engineering and materials science with an orientation around clinical care, Sibel is building wearable devices that can be placed on the body much like a Band-Aid to provide ICU-grade assessment of health status, continuously, in any setting and with any type of patient.
Through corporate engagement and involvement with philanthropic foundations, Sibel’s devices are being used around the globe to address an array of conditions in a partnership with the medical device company Drager.
Building upon its initial work with premature babies, for instance, Sibel has replaced the traditional fetal-monitoring belts that tether mothers to the hospital bed with three wireless sensors that track both mother and baby’s vital signs in the ante, intra and post-partum periods. With support from the Gates Foundation, Sibel has deployed thousands of these devices into health clinics in Zambia, Ghana and India to curtail those nations’ exceptionally high maternal mortality rates.
Alongside Anthem, one of the nation’s largest insurance enterprises, Sibel is using a modified version of its signature platform to facilitate remote monitoring of sleep, effectively bringing the technology capabilities traditionally found only in a sophisticated hospital sleep lab directly into one’s home.
And powered by a $2.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, Sibel is continuing to evolve its wearable COVID-19 monitoring device in which two soft sensors sit on the neck and finger and measure the common COVID-19 symptoms of fever, cough and shortness of breath.
Through careful choices around engineering design that leverage existing manufacturing infrastructure, Sibel is building a new class of reliable, cost-effective remote monitoring systems that is improving patient outcomes and democratizing high-quality healthcare data.
The company, headquartered in Niles, Illinois, is now aggressively building out its team of data scientists, investing in machine learning and artificial intelligence and navigating the FDA approval process.
“All the key pieces are in place,” Rogers said. “Now, it’s about executing.”